German cave diver Nick Vollmar who joined the Thailand cave rescue mission: “If we could cooperate globally in every aspect like we did here, almost all of our problems could be solved.” Over the last few weeks we saw globalism at its very best.

TERROIR THAT TRAVELS
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As the climate changes, how will the production of foods shift as well? Will protected designation of origin (PDO) still be important? Will traditional foods of one… https://t.co/kBQ5nIEVd1

“This is not to say that popcorn is going to completely transform robotic actuation or anything, but it’s weird enough that it might plausibly end up in some useful (if very specific) robotic applications.” https://t.co/POcvIfxEhfpic.twitter.com/ekJ1ouus4t

Yes, it was me who smuggled a large seabird into the plenary and launched it at the speaker’s head with the words “Actually this is more of a cormorant than a question.” I am to be considered for possible readmission to the society in 2038, which seems fair.

The SkyGuardian, a Predator drone variant by US nuclear specialists General Atomics, is currently flying over the UK on the first transatlantic RPA drone flight. You can watch the future of state surveillance flying overhead on FlightRadar right now: https://t.co/XvkdqmoxkNpic.twitter.com/98m5UG0HxS

Biomimicry in architecture is a risky proposition to begin with, but I wish people who are going to do it wouldn’t always be inspired by cliche shapes of leaves etc. we are casually familiar with. Want to see (or even design?) something inspired by the forms of stacked crassulas. pic.twitter.com/lVw43zpqOi

C is a cool programming language where if you want to return a string from a function you have to set up an entire physical-universe human social system for adjudicating who is responsible for freeing it

Bruno Latour’s Borgesian micro-story at the beginning of _On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods_ says almost everything there is to say about the insane mental script running in our modern heads. pic.twitter.com/VAC91bAhh9

‘Unless we introduce a different business model, we will end up with more of the same. It is time to try a mixed economy in those digital markets whose products are in fact classic public goods, such as search and social media.’ https://t.co/z8PUTrQEt9

TWITTER RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM: would you like to see some porn your friends like
FACEBOOK RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM: this terrible thing happened a year ago
AMAZON RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM: buy five more TVs
YOUTUBE RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM: would you like to become a nazi

A lot of apparent stupidity is actually smart people being maliciously lazy. It’s like selective amnesia but for reasoning. You think fewer steps ahead when you suspect you might arrive at a personally inconvenient truth. Motivated non-reasoning. Plausible inferential deniability

Shocked that a webgl program written in scheme can compile itself and run in a static html file that embeds all it’s code, meshes, shaders and textures as base64. The most shocking thing to me is this can be loaded on android browser directly from sdcard without internet access..

The most ironic thing about Ayn Rand isn’t that she was on welfare at the end of her life, it’s that she gave a bunch of scared disenfranchised people a role model and an interconnected community on which to depend to help each other soothe their fears and give their lives meanin

One of my favorite papers ( https://t.co/B6sFKUuHyn ) started a line of work that tries to formalize some related intuitions; it turns out some fairly natural market making strategies for binary options are equivalent to online regret minimization. (1/n) https://t.co/5PsEXcvTg9

Enough about beach bodies. I want a forest body, with soft moss where my armpit hair should be. Or a prairie body, emotions a ripple of wind across my golden face. Or a volcano body, leaking vengeance from every fissure. Other landscapes are possible.

I am unilaterally declaring today, July 5th, Interdependence Day. Today is a day to celebrate our communities, large and small; the systems that we’ve created for the benefit of everyone; and our common resources and environment. And to commit to making them better.

Would you like to monetise your social relations? Learn from hostile designs? Take part in (unwitting) data extractions in exchange for public services?@Playbour : Work, Pleasure, Survival is coming to Furtherfield Gallery 14 Julhttps://t.co/f3FemBZDPK📸: Cassie Thornton pic.twitter.com/qAN4zB2GVS

Six talking points to use when debunking the myth that overpopulation is the root of the environmental crisis:

1.
Rates of population growth are declining: Between 1950 and 2000, the world population grew at a rate of 1.76%. However, between 2000 and 2050, the rate of growth is expected to decline to 0.77%.

2.
Overpopulation is defined by numbers of people, not their behaviors: Industrialized countries, who make up only 20% of the world’s population, are responsible for 80% of the carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere. The United States is the worst offender, with 20 tons of carbon emission per person. Therefore, it is not the amount of people that leads to degradation, but what they are doing. Permaculture design illustrates how humans can have a positive impact on the health of our ecosystems, bringing greater health and equity.

3.
Overpopulation justifies the scapegoating and human rights violations of poor people, women, people of color, and immigrant communities: Often times the subtext of “too many people” translates to too many poor people, people of color, and immigrants. This idea has been used to justify such practices as the forced sterilization of 35% of women of childbearing age in 1970′s Puerto Rico, under the control of and with funding from the US government. This is a human and reproductive rights violation.

4.
Overpopulation points the finger at individuals, not systems: This lets the real culprits off the hook. When we look at the true causes of environmental destruction and poverty, it is often social, political and economic systems, not individuals. We see militaries and the toxic legacy of war, corrupt governments, and a capitalist economic system that puts profit over people and the environment.

5.
Supports a degenerative mental model of scarcity: Much of this ideology was created by Thomas Robert Malthus, an 19th century English scholar. Malthus gave us the erroneous idea that the reason there is famine is because there are too many mouths to feed. This hides the reality that we have a distribution problem, not a scarcity problem. Malthus’s work has been used as the philosophical bedrock to justify many human rights violations throughout history.

6.
Focusing on overpopulation prevents us from creating effective solutions and building movements for collective self determination: Permaculture teaches us that how we define a problem determines how we design solutions. How does viewing overpopulation as a root problem impact the way we think of and design solutions? What would solutions look like if we viewed people, all people, as an asset? The myth of overpopulation has lead to solutions of population control and fertility treatments, rather than overall health care and women’s rights. The more we blame humans and think we are bad and evil, the harder it is to believe in ourselves, count on each other, and build a collective movement for justice and self determination.

Penzance #accesslab signups include marine policy organisations, conservation charities, aquaculture, sail shipping and engineering - all wanting help to access the scientific research the need to do their work. pic.twitter.com/ogvehA1Pr8

‘Cyberfeminism is an occult form of warfare. It understands about cyberspace what 'dark forest’ theory understands about the cosmos: all existence is determined by hostility and so the highest form of intelligence lies in occluding one’s coordinates.’ https://t.co/TDl7PEzvqv

‘If the invention of general purpose computation and robotics had occurred in a society much earlier—one founded on the woven cosmos, what could it have looked like, and how would it have worked? What might it tell us about different ways of doing things?’ https://t.co/X1cofwbRN8

A Polish environmental group placed a tracker on the back of a stork. The migratory bird traveled to Sudan, where someone found the tracker, removed the sim card, put it in their own phone and racked up hours worth of phone calls https://t.co/IjQWUYdXeK#PolishStork

At a wildlife rehab facility I met two crows that said, “caw” in a human accent. They said it like a human reading the word “caw” aloud. The tech shook her head and said, “they’re making fun of us. People say ‘caw’ to them all day, so they’ve started impersonating us.” I <3 crows

Random Forests workshop at #dinacon today, in which marine dinosaurs were de-extincted & bio-engineered to perform large-scale removal of plastics from the ocean and prepare the ground for viable aquaforestry systems. @augmentedeco@HikingHack

Hey Twitter folks! What is the wackiest, zaniest, weirdest online community right now? Preferably something that’s intellectually interesting rather than being a race to the bottom of the tastefulness ladder.

The world’s bees are in decline, driving up the price of pollination so high it has spurred a black market of bee rustlers dealing in stolen hives. The almond growers of California’s central valley, who need 1.8 million hives each year, have seen the price to rent them grow over the past decade from $50 to as much as $200—valuable enough for thieves to spirit thousands away each season in the dead of night, to be rebranded and pawned off to different growers. Last year, police uncovered one cache of contraband bees worth close to $1 million.

Farmers, beekeepers and biologists have a name for the problem: the “beepocalypse.” It started mysteriously in 2006, when hives began failing en masse across North America, and next spread to Europe. Healthy-seeming bees would simply fly away and never come back, leaving behind combs full of honey and a dying, untended queen. Scientists at the time dubbed the phenomenon “colony collapse disorder” and launched a massive research effort, yet no clear cause of the malady has ever emerged. Stranger still, honeybees continue dying even though colony collapse disorder peaked quickly and has been on the wane. Those classic empty-hive symptoms now appear in less than 5% of failed hives, yet beekeepers continue losing between 30% and 40% of their stock every season.

People badly need bees. Biologists chalk up every third bite of food in the human diet to bee pollination, and in terms of the most popular and nutritious food crops the ratio is even higher; bees visit more than 75% of them.

New Process worked #🙂- scan a rock, merge/mash the 3D scan with a 3D file extracted from a console video game (found on the 3D model resource platform). Im modelling software (#b3d) remove overlap and 3D print the resulting part, finally merge the 3D print with the original … pic.twitter.com/YkqQC2gDU6

How do people stay interested in money? I like both production and consumption but connecting the two with money feels increasingly exhausting, like paperwork or standards compliance. Makework middleware.

“Gretchen: On the International Space Station, you have astronauts from the US and from other English speaking countries and you have cosmonauts from Russia. And obviously it’s very important to get your communication right if you’re on a tiny metal box circling the Earth or going somewhere. You don’t want to have a miscommunication there because you could end up floating in space in the wrong way. And so one of the things that they do on the ISS – so first of all every astronaut and cosmonaut needs to be bilingual in English and Russian because those are the languages of space. Lauren: Yep. Wait, the language of space are English and Russian? I’m sorry, I just said ‘yep’ and I didn’t really think about it, so that’s a fact is it? Gretchen: I mean, pretty much, yeah, if you go on astronaut training recruitment forums, which I have gone on to research this episode… Lauren: You’re got to have a backup job, Gretchen. Gretchen: I don’t think I’m going to become an astronaut, but I would like to do astronaut linguistics. And one of the things these forums say, is, you need to know stuff about math and engineering and, like, how to fly planes and so on. But they also say, you either have to arrive knowing English and Russian or they put you through an intensive language training course. But then when they’re up in space, one of the things that they do is have the English native speakers speak Russian and the Russian speakers speak English. Because the idea is, if you speak your native language, maybe you’re speaking too fast or maybe you’re not sure if the other person’s really understanding you. Whereas if you both speak the language you’re not as fluent in, then you arrive at a level where both people can be sure that the other person’s understanding. And by now, there’s kind of this hybrid English-Russian language that’s developed. Not a full-fledged language but kind of a- Lauren: Space Creole! Gretchen: Yeah, a Space Pidgin that the astronauts use to speak with each other! I don’t know if anyone’s written a grammar of it, but I really want to see a grammar of Space Pidgin.”

Today seems like the right time to do a thread I’ve been thinking about for a while on how to handle the seemingly never-ending deluge of depressing and disturbing news. My tips are based on my time as a CIA military analyst in which I dealt daily with disturbing content. (1/)

The appearance of Befunge, alongside FALSE (by Wouter van Oortmerssen, interviewed here) and brainfuck, all in 1993, proved to be the watershed moment for language experimentalism that would eventually become a movement (joinging INTERCAL which had been recently revived). The term esolang (or even “esoteric programming language”) would appear years later, its first use on the Befunge mailing list, where much of the early discussions of the form took place.

Pressey’s notes offer some lesser-known aspects of the language, but also an occasion to newly consider it apart from its influence and legacy. The impetus for Befunge was to design the language most difficult to write a compiler for, similar to brainfuck’s conceit as the Turing Complete language for which the smallest compiler could be written (Turing Complete is essential – the compiler for, say, Unnecessary or other languages that challenge basic assumptions of what’s required to make a language, would be much smaller). Compiling code is the act of translating from a source language into a target language, usually machine code. Befunge challenges this in two ways. First, its most famous feature, it’s a 2D language, so code is not read linearly (left-to-right, top-to-bottom), but sometimes vertically, sometimes backwards, and sometimes off the page on the right side, to appear on the left, like a Pac Man board (thus giving the program space a toroidal topology). While that makes it challenging to do AOT compilation, probably the second feature is even more challenging: it’s self-altering, meaning it changes its own source code as it runs. Writing an interpreter for Befunge, however is far easier; the interpreter written (by Pressey) in VB.NET is concise. An interpreter executes as it runs, taking away this difficulty, although interpreters are often slower (interpreted languages include Javascript and Python). There are also Befunge pseudo-compilers.

Russia’s athletes and military personnel are increasingly turning to ancient pagan beliefs, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church has warned. The Orthodox church, a strong conservative force closely allied to the Kremlin, has expanded its presence in the Russian military with specially trained priests who are attached to individual units. The patriarch’s words are the latest volley in the church’s long battle against paganism, a tribal pre-Orthodox belief system.

For those contemplating exactly how out of control America was then compared to now, the most pertinent evidence is the book’s compendium of a near-constant series of terror bombings. The authors describe explosions in New York at National Guard headquarters, police headquarters, and three Manhattan banks; bombings in San Francisco’s Presidio and at a church during a police officer’s funeral; Molotov cocktails tossed in Wisconsin city halls and Connecticut ROTC offices; post offices, courthouses, and draft boards lit up across the country; 81 sticks of dynamite found at a Kansas university; and rocks, bottles, and eggs tossed directly at Nixon and California Gov. Ronald Reagan. According to Bryan Burrough’s 2015 book Days of Rage (Penguin Press), the U.S. suffered nearly five bombings every day during one 18-month period in 1971–72. Hijackings had become so common—33 in 1969 alone—that the president’s family was barred from flying commercial. Leary’s overseas spree (where he found himself continually squeezed as a cash cow by those he relied on) dovetailed with America’s cultural and political chaos. By January 1973, when the feds decided they weren’t going to let aggravating legal niceties hold them back and just kidnapped him in Afghanistan, the violence that had inspired Nixon to prioritize his capture was winding down. But for a while there, it was bad. The modern American populace would likely die of head-exploding embolisms if even a quarter of that sort of madness were common today.

UK Climbingsaw these results and, to help train an even more capable neural network, sent me their entire database - all 427,000 names. These were the names of climbing routes from all around the world, in dozens of languages, names from the traditional (Muscle Crack, The Gizzard, Problem 21) to the more fanciful (Gandalf’s Groove Direct, Owl and Primroses).

First, for the cleanest dataset possible, I extracted the countries that have mostly english-language route names (about 155k names once I removed duplicates and numbered routes), and the neural net quickly learned to produce one plausible route after another. You might be able to slip this into a casual account of your last climbing trip, and have others nod in vague recognition. “Ah, yes, the Folly Cloud. Climbed that one last week before breakfast.”

However, I’m happy to report that some of the names were indeed even weirder than your typical route name.

You’re Not Andrew
Master In Your Tea
Bean on the Pocket
Seven Dry Have Ship
Mantlet Butt’s Locket
No Rocks Egg
In Arms if the Lords
Parking Store Substance
Over a Wall No Mover
The Very Seven Steps
Robin Time and The Sheep
Captain Purple and Darkness
The Sun Tin’s Not Your Winds

Next, I trained the neural net on the entire database, just to see what it would make of the non-English names. It definitely struggled more this time - it reported much lower confidence in its results. But it did manage to become multilingual, generating names that were identifiably French, Spanish, or German (these were the most common languages other than English in the dataset, so these were mostly what it learned). Even if many of them didn’t make much sense.

Its brainpower was spread a bit thin, trying to remember rules for generating multiple languages at once. Unlike human brains, it definitely wasn’t built for compartmentalizing multiple languages. This struggle had an effect on the quality of its English names, which actually I rather like.

Boulder 1, Problem the Gorge
Very Up
Fred birthday
Red 1
Blue Boulders Problem 1
No we and Cheese
The Spooning
Cat of the Shallow
Serpent Mars
End Cow
Escapes of the Beach Brother
The Corner Stand of The Little Heart

The Pedipulator - Cover illustration by the great Walter Molino featured on the 2 January 1966 issue of Italy’s,
La Domenica del Corriere.

The seven-league boots are going to enter into reality: with the so-called pedipulator which multiplies by six the length of a step, the astronauts or American soldiers will move as if they were motorized and on any terrain. The ‘pedipulator’ is one of many applications of those studies and those experiments which, under the pressure of the space race, are changing the face of civilization. This week our correspondent Giancarlo Masini will report what he saw studied at American laboratories where the future has already begun.

Herald/Harbinger is a permanent public artwork, and a kind of living wake for the Bow Glacier. 24/7 the piece relays live data from the glacier into the middle of Downtown Calgary: https://t.co/pbr5Qlybi0